Car Trouble Read online

  I pressed on the accelerator. The forlorn playground across the street floated by. “Is that why you only came inside the building like once? Because it was out of the way?”

  He laughed. “When was that?”

  “You came looking for me one day, all worked up over nothing.” In my sophomore year, when I played Conrad Birdie in a gold lamé jumpsuit.

  “Vaguely.”

  “You threatened my English teacher.” The director of the school play.

  “I’ve threatened a lot of people—even hit a few—but never a teacher. Shame on me.”

  He seldom felt ashamed of any of the stunts he pulled, but I couldn’t argue with him when we were going backward. Besides, I had another left turn coming up. The grim sign Collisionville, blue lettering on dented white metal, appeared as I neared the edge of the school property. Stacks of stripped cars, chassis exposed like entrails, teetered high above the sidewalk on container boxes. Old hubcaps and bald, greasy tires were strewn about. I heard one of the hubcaps crush and crackle under our wheels as I ran over it. Unseen guard dogs yowled into the night.

  We were almost there. Ditmas Avenue, little more than an alley between St. Mike’s and the wrecking joint, would take us past the Wyckoff House and to the market. Then we got a flat. A loud flat. It sounded like a gunshot. I’d never be able to get Himself out of his predicament now.

  “What did you do?” he asked, turning to me, annoyed.

  “I think I hit something.”

  “What’d you do that for?”

  I stopped the car. “I don’t know why you’re busting my balls when you’re the one who got me up to help you do this. Do you want me to help you or not? Because I can go home right now.”

  Two years ago, he would have smacked me across the face for that kind of back talk, but he merely got out of the Chevy, slamming the door. I got out too and looked at the rear wheel on the driver’s side. It wasn’t like we could see much. There was one streetlight, half a block away. I couldn’t see what caused the flat, but it didn’t matter. The situation was completely hopeless.

  Dad was still crouching, looking at the tire. “Guess you don’t want to leave this by your school. What will the good Brothers say?”

  “It’s not my school anymore,” I said, rubbing my eyes and looking down at the asphalt. “So now what?”

  We were going to have to push the car after all. He lowered his weight against the front of the car and shoved. I copied his stance and stretched my hamstrings and whatever muscles I had back there to the max. I used as much force as I could, but I didn’t have it in me. Finally, the Chevy lurched. I didn’t even look up, just gripped the headlight as we forged ahead. Soon, we reached the end of the alley. Across Ralph Avenue there was a UPS warehouse and a sagging concrete train trestle that supported a discontinued freight railroad track. We pushed the car across the empty street, and then it rolled down another short alley, the deflated tire flapping against the asphalt. The car came to a stop.

  “Man, I am so sick of this,” I said. “Can’t we just leave it here and go?”

  “Pipe down, mister. Ten minutes, I promise.”

  I wouldn’t look at him. “Mom was right. You should’ve called a tow truck. We could have paid for it.”

  “I don’t need your mother’s money, young man.”

  Yes, you do. I was making him angry. He wouldn’t look at me. I wiped my hands on my sweaty shorts. He put his hands back on the car hood and waited for me to join him. I could almost hear him count to ten. A couple of good shoves, and we were able to ease the Chevy under the train trestle. I thought I was being sucked into some sooty tunnel, but the market appeared on the left, an open-air collection of wholesale and retail vendors locked up behind a high chain-link fence crowned with hoops of razor wire. A tall spotlight inside the market shone on the vendors’ signs: M&M Smoked Fish, Mr. Pickle. Raindrops spattered on my neck. Great. Now we would get good and soaked.

  Dad straightened all the way back up and walked over to the fence. He pointed to an eighteen-wheeler parked next to the loading dock of Mr. Pickle and said, “Wonder how I can get a job like that. Out on the open road. Like I did in Florida.”

  Another venture that didn’t work out. I said nothing.

  “I know I can drive, even in reverse.” He laughed heartily. “Any job would do, Nicky. Any job.”

  Sometimes I felt sorry for him. “I know, Dad. I know.”

  I could picture him trying to scale the fence, ripping his pants on the razor wire, just for the chance to hide in the back of one of the trucks and wake up someplace else—while Mom waited on the couch for the click of the front door that wouldn’t come.

  But now it was my turn to leave. In one of his sober moments, he once told me, “You have to have some kind of drive. Me, I never had one.” Before I even knew what he was really telling me. I didn’t know how things would go without me in the house, whether it would be easier or harder for my sisters, or if they would just bide their time and get out.

  “Let’s do what we need to do and get out of here,” I said.

  There was always plenty of sky in Brooklyn and that night, I stood under an upside-down bowl of clouds. The sky was the color of a trash-can lid. A brick building across from the market housed the city’s garbage trucks. The rain stirred up a rank residue from the day’s collections in those trucks that were parked outside.

  “It’s enough to gag a maggot,” Dad said, nodding at them.

  I laughed, despite myself. It was one of his better lines. “Where’re you going to put the car?” I thought: And then what? We look for a taxi?

  “I think over there.” He indicated a spot where the security fence met the train trestle. It was bursting with waist-high weeds and a thicket of Queen Anne’s lace. I wondered if this was the spot where he junked all the cars over the years—the Green Hornet, the Black Beauty, and the other glamour tanks that rumbled into our lives for a short time and then vanished.

  We pushed the Blue Max into its final resting place.

  He handed me a long black flashlight from the glove compartment and got his toolbox from the trunk. The driver’s-side door was still open; he told me to aim the beam on the lower left-hand corner of the blue dashboard, in front of the steering wheel. “First I’m taking off the VIN tags,” he said, peering at the dashboard. His voice was muffled as his right hand poked around with the screwdriver. “That’s short for Vehicle Identification Number. You have to destroy them or they’ll trace the car to you. I’m looking for two rivets here. Mother of God.” He paused, then his blue eyes suddenly lit up. “Got ’em.”

  The light shone on a scar that ran below his cheekbone to his chin, and I tried to remember how long ago he had been stabbed in the face while breaking up a fight at Harkins, this bucket of blood in Park Slope. I stepped away from the door, sticking the flashlight between the door and the dashboard while he worked with the screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Next, we took the plates. Crouching, he removed the front license plate while I shone the beam on the screws. Empire State. Orange and blue.

  “I talked to your uncle about borrowing his car to drive you to Pittsburgh,” he said, removing the rear plate. “And he thinks it should be okay. Who knows? Maybe he’ll come.”

  I could smell the VO5 he used to slick down his hair. I planned to borrow a friend’s van, but if Himself wanted to drive me, there was no way I was getting out of it. “Sure. That would be great. I don’t have that much stuff.”

  He rose, the plate in his left hand, screwdriver and pliers in his right, and winked at me. “Everybody says that, until they pack up a car.”

  I thought we were done, but he wanted another minute with the Blue Max. He ran his hand along the back of the car, from the right wing tip down to the center of the trunk and up again to the left tip. He reached below and caressed the taillight’s ruby-colored bulbs, as if he were copping a feel. It was still more than a car to him. Before he’d picked up the Impala for sixty bucks at the Sixty-Ninth Preci
nct, it was designed like other cars from his era—to take flight; to make drivers in lesser cars gaze longingly at its sleek form, with the trunk forming a brow over the recessed taillights that watched the street behind you like a second pair of eyes. It was sad—an insult, really—to leave it behind like this.

  It was drizzling, the rain stirring up pungent odors from the thickets of weeds everywhere. Dad pocketed the keys and the VIN tags, tossed the flashlight into the yellow tool kit, and picked it up. I carried the license plates. And that was it. The Blue Max could now be picked over by junkmen and junkies, scrap metal vendors and hobos looking for a place to sleep.

  We walked under the crumbling trestle. A couple of rats brazenly scampered past; they were as fat as the ones on the subway tracks. The rain fell heavily now, ruining Dad’s coiffure and matting his thinning hair and dampening my brown curls. Out there in the tungsten-colored streetscape, he looked older and diminished in some way after driving in reverse.

  “How do we get out of here?”

  The raindrops rolled down his neck, soaking through the collar of his yellow polo shirt. My T-shirt was pretty wet too, but I didn’t mind the rain. At least it was washing off the smell of the Blue Max.

  “Well, I guess we have to walk,” he said.

  I checked my watch; it was two thirty. The Church Avenue bus wasn’t running. “Okay. I don’t want to go past the cemetery again.”

  We headed down Ralph Avenue. Two hours had passed since my mother had nudged me awake to join in the fun and the night wasn’t over yet.

  “That was some forty-five minutes,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t wear a watch.”

  I laughed. He always had a comeback.

  On the next block, we passed a bar, the Midnight Pearl Lounge. Himself stopped outside the humble building, black stucco with a pink neon sign of tilted martini glasses over the entrance. A cop car shot past us, heading toward Church. It was a good thing we hadn’t been seen coming out of the alley.

  “A man might be thirsty after tonight’s endeavors,” he said.

  My real job wasn’t to help him junk the car or avoid getting a ticket, but one I had performed since I was a kid: making sure he made it home. I was about to flunk. But I gave it one more try. “Mom’s waiting up for us. I think we better get going.”

  He was scoping out the joint through the darkened window. The shank of the evening had long passed, but he flashed an Irishman’s smile at me, game for anything as long as the devil found out about it before the Lord. “Come on, Nicky, don’t be a deadbeat. You helped me out of a jam.”

  “All I did was hold the flashlight.”

  He was staring me down, the blazing blue eyes twisting my arm. “You can have a drink with your old man before you leave your mother and go off to parts unknown.”

  He handed me the tool kit. The door, warped oak with three recessed panels, creaked as he opened it. I guess I was having a nightcap.

  II.

  The Green Hornet

  Two

  My father never said anything about buying a car, but one Saturday afternoon he drove down our block with the Green Hornet. It was the middle of May; I was ready to graduate from grammar school. I was crouching in the garden, making a pile of the crabgrass I’d pulled from around the spring flowers, purple and white tulips and hyacinths in pink and Wedgwood blue.

  Dee Dee ran up the stoop and yelled through the window screen in the front porch, “Daddy’s here! And he’s got a car!” Her face was flushed, her brown curls wild. She held a jump rope in her right hand. “Nicky, did you hear me?”

  “I heard you.” I stood up behind the Japanese yew. Dad was in the street with his new car, looking under the hood. Dee Dee was down on the sidewalk, standing next to the car. “Is that your car, Daddy?” she asked. He mumbled a reply. I threw the clumps of crabgrass into a garbage pail in the driveway and wiped my hands. I had spent an hour cutting old cane off the rosebushes, the kind with the big, stabbing thorns, and planting them around the tulips and hyacinths. I was ready to see how fast our neighbors tried to pick them now that they had protection.

  It was our first car, but my first thought about it was: It’s not even new. My second thought was: How old is it? In fact, the Green Hornet was a 1956 Ford Fairlane. In its day, it must have been something, a two-tone flourish of greens. Nobody made cars in those colors anymore—sea green from the hood to the trunk and pine green for the hardtop and the sides. Even better, the greens were bisected by an ornate chrome wave that rolled across the sides of the car, moving from the recessed headlights and cresting to a bold, sharp point on the front door and tapering near the taillights. If someone had taken the time to shine it up and reattach the front fender, dangling from the grille like loose bridgework, the Green Hornet would have been the envy of every family on our block. Right now, it had the air of abandonment about it, like something from an old movie.

  Maureen, my eldest sister, came to the front door. She stood in the vestibule, skinny and tall, straight brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, a paperback in her left hand. She was fourteen months younger than me. “Did someone say we have a car?” She looked suspicious but then saw the Green Hornet. Then she went back inside, probably to get Mom. Soon, Patty, who came after Maureen in the birth order, rode up on the sidewalk next to me on her blue Schwinn, a sheen of sweat on her lightly freckled face.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Dad still had his head under the hood, fiddling with the insides.

  “Let’s see if it actually runs.”

  The car was some kind of make-up present. I couldn’t wait for Mom’s reaction.

  Mary Ellen came along next, trailing her hand along our neighbor’s fence, from one black wrought-iron bar to the next. She was the baby of the family.

  Maureen came out of the house with Mom. She was wearing a yellow apron, the one with rickrack trim and a safety pin at the waistband, over a blue checked dress. Her face was flushed with surprise.

  “Jesus, Pat, where the hell did you get this?” She didn’t exactly sound pleased. Like I said: make-up present.

  “Sixty-Ninth Precinct. Fifty bucks.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Patty whispered.

  I shrugged. I would ask Mom later. Dad was chuckling as she walked up to the car and peered inside the window. The set was falling out of her chestnut hair, her curls drooping at the nape of her neck. “Did you have to get this color?”

  He looked up from the car’s guts, a smirk on his face. “It only came in one color, Claire.” He was still thin, in his gray work pants and button-down gray shirt, always with the five o’clock shadow and the sleeves rolled up halfway, black hair bristling on his forearms. He said, with a flourish, “I’m going to call it the Green Hornet.”

  She took a closer look at the Ford. “I hope you’re going to wash these windows.”

  “I’ll have one of the kids do it tomorrow. Maybe Nicky will volunteer.” Dad turned to me and smiled.

  “Why do I have to do it?”

  “Because I said so. Your sisters can help.”

  Great. He brings home a jalopy, and we have to clean it.

  We didn’t have the dog then, so it was just the five of us out there on the sidewalk, standing around nervously, wondering if Mom was going to make Himself take the car back. Then Mary Ellen went over and ran her hand along the tarnished chrome wave on the side of the car, grinning. That week, she had impulsively cut her bangs off and her light brown hair stuck up like the bristles of a typewriter eraser. She looked like a goon but was too young to know it.

  “At least somebody likes the car,” Dad said, scooping her up with one arm and carrying her to the front door. He opened it with a flourish. “Come on, short pants, let’s go for a ride. Anybody else wanna come?”

  Mom shoved her hands into the pockets of her apron. “Now? Pat, I’m in the middle of making supper.”

  Nobody was hungry now that we had a car. All Dad had to do was drive up with a
weird old car and the very air changed. Suddenly a lazy afternoon turned into an exciting Saturday night, humming with possibilities. Patty rode her bike into the yard and stashed it in the garage. I finished with the garden and went into the kitchen to wash my hands. The table was already set, white plates on a plastic, flowered tablecloth. Frozen green beans were defrosting in a pot of water on the stove. The cast-iron frying pan was out on the adjacent burner. Mom was wrapping up a platter of seasoned chop meat and putting it back in the refrigerator. The paperback lay open on the dishwasher, its spine bent in the middle. Lisa Bright and Dark. Maureen’s book. She was rereading it, morose even at twelve.

  I dried my hands with a towel and looked at Mom for some sign of how she thought this joyride was going to go, because you couldn’t tell with Dad—his moods changed so quickly—but I couldn’t read her face. All she said, pot cover in her hand, was “You go ahead. I’ll lock up.” The yellow apron was already hanging on the kitchen closet doorknob.

  My sisters squeezed into the backseat of the Green Hornet. Maureen climbed in first, tucking her ponytail under her chin, as if it was going to get in the way. Mary Ellen and Dee Dee followed. There was just enough room for Patty, who got in on the opposite side. She sat next to the window.

  Although the Ford looked cumbersome, weighed down by its faded glamour, Dad made it move once he fired up the engine. He tore out of our block, driving it like a getaway car. The one thing everyone remembers about Himself was the way he drove, like he was on the lam. He hung on the steering wheel, tailgating drivers, jockeying for position, slicing across the lanes on Linden Boulevard like a speed skater going for Olympic gold.

  I was sitting up front with Mom. I rolled down the window and rested my arm on the creamy green door. The girls were all smiling in the backseat, hair touching one another’s shoulders. The car was pretty dingy inside, with frayed pine-green leather seats and a stale smell of rust and cigarettes, but we didn’t care. We were going somewhere, and we never went anywhere, because we didn’t have what everybody else had: a car! Now, there’d be trips to the beach, trips out of the city. If Dad let us, we could stick decals of the places we visited to the back window, the way the Martinucci family did with their Dodge station wagon: Howe Caverns, Hershey’s Chocolate Factory.